Some Nerd Stuff, Our Sped-Up Neighbor, and a Misplaced Dollar Sign

For about fifteen minutes I owned one of the best cell phones in the world. It’s the Droid Bionic, and when I bought it, it was the absolute pinnacle of mobile phonage. But, of course, it was quickly surpassed. And now, a short year later, it’s not even offered for sale anymore.

Oh well. It’s still a great phone, and I don’t regret the purchase whatsoever. However, it came with the old and moldy Android operating system, codenamed Gingerbread. But Motorola and Verizon promised a quick upgrade to the newest version, called Ice Cream Sandwich, and told all us Bionic owners not to worry our pretty little heads about it.

Then a full year passed, with no upgrade. Some folks were livid, and raised all sorts of hell about it. I read that a $100 credit was issued to those people, and they were allowed to change phones before their contract was up. I was mildly annoyed, but don’t get whipped up about nerdy shit like operating systems. I kept an eye on it, though.

And guess what downloaded to my phone this morning? Yep, Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s a massive upgrade, and took almost an hour to complete. I haven’t had a chance to play around with it yet, but everything looks different. It feels like I have a brand new phone. We’ll see how it goes.

Oh yeah, and now there’s an even newer version of the OS, called Jelly Bean. So, here we are… one version behind again. And I feel slightly creepy for knowing all this stuff. What the hell’s the matter with me? Jelly Bean… Ice Cream Sandwich… the old Frozen Yogurt… This crap shouldn’t be taking up space in my brain.

Perhaps it’s time to welcome Yuengling back into my life?

Our next door neighbor, Poppa Half-Shirt, is in a raking frenzy. Every fall and spring he takes a full week off from work, and gets his house and property ready for the upcoming season. And he’s in full winterizing mode right now.

All weekend he’s been raking, in his half-windbreaker (not really, but I wish it were true), at a crazed tempo. I don’t understand why it has to happen so fast. Raking is necessary, of course, but I don’t see the benefit of doing it at a speed that looks like ancient footage of Babe Ruth running the bases. Ya know?

Half-Shirt, of course, hates my guts. He can’t stand me, and we don’t even wave at each other when we’re both outside. It bugs the crap out of him that I don’t make yard work my highest priority. Our yard looks fine, but his is a showplace. And anyone who isn’t as nuts about it as he is, rubs him the wrong way. Plus, he blames us for his basement flooding every time it rains. It’s a long story… fraught with bullshit. So, we don’t talk.

The people on the other side of us? I never see them. The woman works in their yard sometimes, but I wouldn’t know her husband if he knocked on our front door. And that’s not a joke. Toney knows their names, but I don’t. They’re pleasant on the rare occasions we bump into each other, and that, my friends, is the definition of a perfect neighbor.

What’s your relationship with your neighbors? Is everything cool, or is there a Half-Shirt in the woodpile? Please use the comments section to bring us up to date on this important matter.

Finally, there’s a local commercial — for a car dealership, I think — in which the phrase “just $99 down!” is repeated roughly thirty times. And, just in case you’re not getting the point, it’s also on the screen — but says “99$.”

It drives me insane. I can’t even look at it; I literally avert my eyes when it comes on.

I notice stuff all the time, and am able to let it slide. But that misplaced dollar sign is a bridge too far. I grind my teeth a bit when people add an apostrophe to ANY word that ends in S. Like “turnip’s.” And redundancies cause some minor toof friction as well. Such as:

ATM machine
PIN number
and etc.
3 a.m. in the morning

Those kinds of things bug me, but “99$” is too much. Am I overreacting? Is there anything like this that’s making you cringe? Please tell me I’m not alone.

Comments

I probably spend as much of my free time at the neighbors as I do my own house. We watch a lot of ball games and consume mass quantities of alcohol. Irregardless, he’s a good guy and his wife is a good cook. 😉

I have an 86 year old woman as a neighbor and we call her CCTV. Every time we leave “Where are you going?”. When I come home she’ll tell me if there’s something in my mailbox or if someone came by. My friends tell me if they come over when we’re not home, she’ll yell “she’s not home”. It drives me nuts. But, she’ll identify the mushrooms I pick as ‘buono’ or ‘non buono’ and she give me the figs off her enormous tree because she can’t eat them, so we let it go. Plus, she’s 86 – she ain’t gonna last that much longer, so fuck it.

We have an elderly neighbor who is much more insidious. He’s made it his full-time job to write multi-page angry letters to every person on the block, usually in regard to barking dogs. I have to admit, he’s got a point, the desert lunatics around here sure love their angry dogs, but I can’t believe he seriously thinks those mouth-breathers are going to read his manifestos in full.

I have Mormon neighbors all around. They keep their houses up well, have well behaved kids and are as boring as hell. Things could be far worse, but it would be nice to have someone around to enjoy a nice cold beer with. Now I just get icy stares if I dare to have a beer while doing yard work.

The dollar sign would drive me bat shit crazy. There was a “Revere Mortgage” commercial on TV with Robert Wagner. Something popped up that said “MortAgage.” Drove me up the goddamn wall every time I looked at it.

We used to have whacky neighbors – a couple of NYC big time environmentalist lawyers. They’d come up here to the ‘burbs on the weekends. These 2 fools with their three ugly, gangly children would make it a point to go marching through the surrounding state land. During hunting season. With bullets flying. Because “they’re OUR woods, too!” Then they’d get all riled up when they heard gunshots. Assholes. They sold the house – to her SISTER. Complete opposite. Another bunch that only come up on the weekends. And not every weekend, either.It’s grand. Other than that, we have an old man and his wife anout 1/4 mile down the road. He goes around picking up trash people throw out of their car.

Don’t talk to me about cell phones. Mine’s a freaking relic. It’s so old it doesn’t even have a camera.

My neighbors are similar………. one on one side that seems to not exist for the most part, and the other side is a poppa half shirt wanna be……. they think they own my yard and that i should do what they want with it……….. assholes. I do everything i can to piss em’ off, too. 😉 within reason, of course………..

oh man, don’t get me started on the PETA folks who purposely tramp thru the woods during hunting season just hoping that a hunter mistakes somebody for a deer…accidental shooting freaks trying to encite gun control. They did that once up where I hunt…a Volvo station wagon sporting a PETA sticker somehow got torched. They pissed off some hunter with a brick of Firestarter. Another time they parked their cars behind the hunter’s trucks…trying to box them in. Hunter hooked up a chain from their Ford F250 with the Powerstroke Diesel to four of their cars and dragged them down a dirt road for over 3 miles. He dragged them all clustered together in a mass…all rubbin and grinding together…likely ruined all their automatic transmissions in the process.

I live next to a crazy chinese bitch who acuses me ansd my girlfriend of cutting down the plants in her vegetable garden with scissors. She doesn’t understand that deer ravage everyone’s gardens in this area. Despite the deer tracks in her garden, she still blames us. Crazy bitch.

You have the pain and the dog. Just throw in a pickup truck (perhaps an F250 with an illiterate driver) and you’re on the road to Nashville. If you want to take the road to Austin you’ll need to add Pathos and Ethos which, as I understand it, are just outside Port Arthur across from the old Joplin place.

Always, always trying to help, even in a world of rednecks with big trucks and small johnsons.

My next door neighbor is a retired lady. If she sees me outside, she’ll come right out and start asking questions. If I have someone doing work at my house, she’ll ask them how much they’re charging for whatever they’re doing. (She pretends that she might like to have the same work done, but she’s just nosey.)

She keeps borrowing my garden hose. Sometimes it’s all unhooked when I come home from work. I asked her to stop unhooking the hose, because it’s hard to get it back on again. Another neighbor recently told me she just uses my water to water her plants. I had to start locking the hose in the garage.

Neighbors are great now that the felon skedaddled a while back. We held a block party last weekend and got reacquainted, because for the most part everybody keeps to themselves.

Cell phone woes? Not here – I have some old flip phone that has a full keyboard for texting and (woo!) a camera, but is otherwise dumb as a box of hair. Fine by me – I’m not paying 30 beans a month for yet another data package.

My neighbors are all small: About 5 inches tall or so. They constantly complain about the weather (or the lack thereof). On Tuesday evenings they all get together on the sidewalk in front of my house and openly mock me and my family for being “clumsy giants”, that “could never fit into a shoebox”. Sometimes I think that I ought to put out some of those humane mosetraps around the neighborhood and try to capture some of my neighbors, then I would have them mailed to Mongolia, or someplace else far away from here. Good luck getting back home, lil’ neighbor!

I got a semi-half shirt next door. He didn’t much care for me the first decade I lived here. Never waved, had a sour look on his face anytime he looked at the cars parked in the driveway (I drive old loud cars and trucks with v8’s, dual exhaust, and various levels of hot rod in each). He has softened up a bit. Guess he figured out I wasn’t going anywhere. Or killing him with kindness was working.

The other neighbour moved in a few months ago. Saw him for the first time this past weekend when I was raking leaves. Nice enough young couple, keep to themselves and hardly a peep to be heard from that house. Still havn’t met the wife though, she was outside last weekend as well but kept herself busy with their kid.

Across the road to the left is a self involved snooty asshole. Always avoids eye contact, turns his back towards anyone that happens to be outside. Killing him with kindness threw him for a loop once when I went out to my truck when it was parked on the street and he come out from behind his car not expecting to see anybody… It visibly pained him to have to say something and you knew he was pissed off at himself for forgetting to do a people check before showing himself.

Across the road to the right is another keep to themselves folks, but at least they acknowledge you when they are outside. Their little boy loves my noisy truck. The little girl likes the car. Subversive hot rod indoctrination. =-)

My current neighbors are all friendly enough, but I don’t know any of their names, even the ones we’ve lived next door to for sixteen years. However, now that I have a dog that I walk around the neighborhood, I know everyone’s dogs’ names. I don’t like to think too hard about what that says about me.

Grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. all drives me insane. Weird pronunciation is another thing I can’t stand. There was a local radio commercial with a woman who pronounced “washers” as “warshers” and I had to lunge to change the station every time I heard it come on.

For years I’ve heard people around here say “Warshington”, as in “them folks up in Warshinton….” And since I live in VA (which is supposedly a key state for the upcoming Choose-The-One-Who-Pisses-You-Off-The-Least quadannual festival, it’s even on the TV and radio commercials here. For both sides. Arrrgh.

As the resident cell phone sales guy, I can tell you that even I carry an outdated phone. You just get used to it. Too expensive to keep up with the trends. My neighbors are family on the one side, so I can’t complain too much. The neighbor on the other side is a city ball field, which sucks when they run late night tournaments, but otherwise is great. Lots of wide open green space and parking lot. The neighbors across the street are in apartments, and aside from one guy who has drunkenly threatened to “end me”, they’re all pretty quiet. The one poor quality guy has shut up after seeing me load the truck up to get ready to go to the shooting range…I think he figured out that if there’s that many guns in the house, it’s best to just shut up, lest someone go all Vietnam on his ass.

I guess we have a general sampling of neighbors around here. The perfect ones are in back of us. It’s a public golf course, but the tees are situated so that we rarely get any incoming. Then there is the garden out front and to one side. It’s not really a garden, more like a teeny farmer’s field. He plants beans in it one year, then corn the next. Like I told him one day when he hopped out of his tractor to visit for a bit, I love the corn years. The corn grows up and you feel isolated and enjoy total solitude for an entire growing season. He just smiled. In fact, we all like the corn years, except for our little terrier. He seems to be afraid of the rustling sounds the corn stalks make when the corn is high and green and when it is dried and ready to harvest. It does, however, give us a much needed break from the neighbor who lives on the other side of the field. This individual is quite nosy and interfering, especially when drunk, which is quite often. However, when the corn is high, I don’t have to worry about phone calls asking me to interpret what I was doing that they saw while looking across the field into my windows. Another neighbor is simply fabulous. He watches things in a helpful way, calling us if he spots strangers about or if something seems amiss. Then there are the neighbors catty corner from us (am I allowed to include them?) who act out marital conflicts by taking turns letting their dog out of the fence so the other spouse has to go search the neighborhood for it. It takes all kinds, I guess, and we got ’em all, from the aforementioned, up to and including do-it-yourselfers who start prolonged projects requiring lots of sawing and hammering early on Saturday mornings, to pool partiers who go on way after dark till the deputies have been by 3 times warning them to quit, and not to leave out the neighbors who keep to themselves from us neighbors but seem to have lots of friends coming and going at all hours of the night.
As for the redundancies of communication–try letting the Observer in you take over and just comment quizzically to yourself, “Hmmm! Now THAT’S redundant and repititious!” Helps me. Or, try thinking of alternatives that you might find entertaining. For instance, my grandkids don’t identify early morning hours by the specific time–they just generalize with “butt crack of dawn.” That works. On sooo many levels.

On one side of us we have the neighbor who is meticulous about his lawn. In fact, I don’t think a day goes by that he isn’t outside doing something…mowing, picking, planting, weeding, spraying, catching varments…We look like the Clampett’s, before the discovery of oil, next to him.

On the other side, we have the wacko bitch and her whining kids and pussified husband. Three kids under the age of 6/7. All they do is whine, cry and scream. So the day she came over complaining our dogs were barking (inside the house) and woke up her baby, my boyfriend told her that her whining fucking kids woke us up and have been doing so for years each and every weekend.

A few years back, my boyfriend had an old dog that could no longer navigate steps. It was half Rot, half Shephard….160lbs. He some how got out of the house via the back door and was laying in the driveway. She called the cops stating a “dangerous” dog was loose in the neighborhood then proceded to try to drag him UP our deck steps by his collar. That shit happened before my time here. I would have pushed her down the steps. Then drug her around by her collar.

HA! The little old lady I was telling you about wants us to cut the hedge down between our houses. Says her tomatoes don’t get enough sun. The woman we bought our house from told us she would say that, but told us not to do it “She’ll know what you’re having for dinner” she said!

thatkayboy of thewvsr: I don’t get whipped up about nerdy shit like operating systems

[my brother just bought an HTC Dream- the very 1st android phone introduced – and I was slightly jealous] You are keeping up with the game. No worries. Congrats on the ICS!

Re: “99$.”
I’m currently in a position where I have to email my Aunt family updates. She was a career editor and I go out of my way to make sure the emails I send her are triple checked for grammar and spelling.

I said outloud tonight, after an hour of composing,
“I hate that my aunt is an editor! It sucks ass sending her long-winded emails! ” LOL

i live up a holler in wv
the neighbors up the holler think everyones property should look like disneyland
bitch at me because the 1/2 mile or more of road frontage i own is not weedeaten weekly
get upset when i tell them the state mows 1 time a summer
good enough for me
he showed up to help when i was building a tractor shed near the road
he said that he was going to make sure it was level and looked good
he grabbed level and decided that my post were quarter of inch out of level
so i said
you are doing that incorrectly
i threw my level up against the hill
he left
building leans out about a foot at top of each wall

then above him on the holler is the mount salem revival camp
they bring donanaters from many differt states to help us poor ignorant backwoods heathans
rake in big bucks
for some reason we barefoot heathens never see a penny
when they drive by and see me they yell”jesus loves you”
because i don’t want to be rude ,i fell i have to yell something back
usually its”fuck you”, acompanyed by a wave,not utilizing all my fingers
down the holler is my buddy, pw
if i need help doing anything at all, from build sheds, to delivering calves, mechanic work, whatever, he’s there
cant ask for better friend or neighbor
i try to help back as much

i recently updated my cell phone
i now have the 8$ special from dollar store
the only time it is even turned on is emergencys, or when i am fishing, and he is at work

But, I had gotten to the point where I had enough of the club scene in my hallway & stepping over people to get to my front door.

As I was attempting to leave my abode this morning, I instead had to take cover. Four armed officers busted the hall neighbors in a VERY COPS manner. I heard someone say “gun” and I ran to the back of my unit. Far far away from bullet striking distance.
Not going out like a FARK link.

My neighbors are great. Next door is Dan and he’s always borrowing shit, but he’s a good guy and his wife is nice. On the other side is a single mom whose teenage daughter Anna babysits for us every once in a while. We’re all cool around here.

There is a poppa half shirt on the corner though. WWII vet with slicked back hair and a fucking grimace on his face around the clock. He doesn’t wave, he stares.

I’ve seen a commercial where they replace the word “mortgage” with the word “YOURgage” and boast that you can finance for 29 years instead of 30 years if you’d like. Fuck them.

Our “senior level management” all use the same phrases during long-winded speeches and conference calls which bug the shit out of me including “wrap our heads around” whatever is fucked up.

They also like the word “invaluable”. To me, that means worthless, opposite of valuable, but they are all pompous assholes and think they know how to run a business because their parents paid more money for college than mine.

We also have a VP who likes to email 1,000 people at one time who gets “to” and “too” backwards the majority of the time. He is also an Ivy League boy and he can kiss my ass.

We have great neighbors, very little nosiness, and everyone pretty much keeps to themselves.

The only small annoyance is a family across the street who have a semi-retarded hyper-active seventh grader who likes to yell out of his bedroom window at anyone walking down the street. A few summers ago, he decided to lecture me about the dangers of cigarette smoking, so I offered him one and told him it tasted better than a chocolate bar. He ran in the house yelling and waving his arms up over his head like he had just been ass raped. About ten seconds later, his dad came out and apologized to me for his kid’s advice and we both laughed it off.

About a year ago, Ford had a NATIONAL advertising campaign for one of their new cars, the Edge. At the very end of the ad when they’re showing the financing options, one of them is for the “Egde”. Nice proofreading, boys and girls…

I hate “hot water heater”, and almost everyone says it. No one ever says “I had to replace my water heater” or “water tank”, it’s always hot water heater. If you already have hot water then you don’t need a heater for it. Even the stores sell hot water heaters.GRRR!!!!

My east neighbours are great – always a laugh and at 52+ she still looks great in a bikini – think Christina Hendricks. Yeah their son is a drummer but I’ve learned to calm down since my last rant… and since no one seems to be swearing tonight, I’ll control myself.

My west neighbours, unlike all the others have only been next door for about a year or two. Yes I will admit that I use the Clint Eastwood line “fish heads” but it’s meant for outrageous comedic effect rather than thinly disguised bigotry.

They replaced the family with Russian mob ties who stayed a week or less since they claim there was a break in and she freaked… I’m not so sure.

They replaced the lesbians (butch not lipstick). One had a sense of humour and we got along greatly! The other, not so much. Still, they WERE LESBIANS…. yes I an 12.

And THEY replaced the ones I miss the most. She was a court reporter so tons of great stories. He was a former professional football player from Scotland. When he drank he was harder to understand than Ozzy without the subtitles. But they were great. We’d sit out front on our porches after dinner and have tea until the mosquitoes attacked.

I met my neighbours South East of me a month ago for the first time… no big deal except we’ve lived across from each other for 12 years.

One thing I noticed about today’s replies are all the different writing styles. From the one big wall of text folks to the “caps? what do you mean caps?” folks… it’s quite interesting.

My neighborhood is full of wacko’s. Or we are the wacko’s and everyone else is normal. Either way I can’t wait to move someday.

The neighbor’s to the left use to give us all kinds of hell. He is a cranky old man who would practice trumpet all hours of the day. He built a privacy fence (score!) so he didn’t have to look at our kids playing in the yard but he didn’t know what the hell he was doing so it changes angle every panel and will fall over in our yard when there is enough wind. Thankfully him and his wife moved up to the lake so we only see the wife every couple of weeks or so when the lawn needs mowed or the sidewalk needs shoveled.

The neighbor to the right are die hard Catholics but are nice enough for small talk. They home-school their kids and never let them out of their sight. The kids are 8 and 6 and have never played outside without a parent watching them. In their fenced in yard. They wouldn’t let their kids play with mine when we first moved here but now the baby is grown they let him come over sometimes and play. The husband is constantly doing yard work and the wife all summer was hanging books (?!) on a makeshift clothes line by their garage.

We have a family two houses down that gives us nothing but grief. Their daughter is a little shit that would cuss out my husband when she was 5 and use to barge in my house whenever she felt like it. I barred my kids from talking to her but now she is obsessed with us and will walk by our house yelling stuff at us. Her parents don’t give a shit so we just ignore her.

We have an alley behind our house and the lady who is behind us would rather call the city and complain that our trash bin is too close to the alley than come over and ask if we could move it.

Also someone in our neighborhood (possibly the trash bin lady) called the county and told them we had no heat, hot water, and we were infested with rats. So I got to give the health department a tour of the house. He just shook his head and said that someone in our neighborhood doesn’t like us.

I want to move somewhere where everyone just minds their own business unless, you know, my house is burning down or something.

Wow..after reading some of these entries, I’m a lot more thankful for my neighbors!

My only gripe with one of my neighbors is that everything he has is LOUD! Having grown up next to an Air Force base, noise doesn’t usually bother me too much, but he just came home with a new customized Mustang that shakes the whole freakin’ house! He likes to sit in the driveway and rev the engine up, too–because it’s clearly not loud enough for him with it just idling!

Yes, we’re all impressed with your new toy and we’re all glad you’ve got enough money to burn on stuff like that! Congrats.

On my right are a great couple, about the same age, who we love. We share beers around a fire in one or the others’ backyard and also share their pool and our foosball tables.

On the left is a couple with two elementary age children. They are never seen outside and hire people to all their yard work, house maintenance and child watching. We invited them to our son’s graduation party and the wife was the whitest person I’ve ever met. Everyone thought she was wearing white pantyhose. Think Edgar Winter without the white hair and red eyes.

People who have poor grammar and punctuation skills should be made to watch old episodes of the “Electric Company” and “School House Rock.” That stuff is actually pretty handy…I still remember it even today!

When it comes to neighbours, I am very lucky. On the left, with our laneways siamesed, is Tom and his wife. I am a car guy and Tom has a nice clean, semi-hot rodded ’72 Monte Carlo. He also likes drinking, heavy metal and women. His wife is really nice too and they are especially friendly to my daugher. We get along great, drink and go to concerts together.
On my right, with our houses attached, is Don, his wife and two sons. They are a nice couple, friendly but not intrusive. Don is into camping (like me) and has a tent trailer and an unrestored ’57 Pontiac two door in his back yard. I am actually disapointed that his boys (18 and 20?) aren’t having a few parties every summer (hello, where are all the 18-20 girls?) but complaing that a family you share a wall with is too quiet seems silly. It’s nice to know that the folks on either side of me won’t be calling the city by-law over the stock car project and tent trailer sitting in my yard.
Across the street is Ron and his family. His mother in law lives two doors down from them. My daughter is best friends with their daugher and we get along great, we even went camping with them this summer. Ron is on (legitemate) disability so he is home all the time, bored out of his mind. He is able to get around somewhat, just not stay on his feet for long periods at a time and his range of movement is limited. Still, he manages to cut lawns on his lawn tractor, blow leaves with his leaf blower and move snow with his snow blower. (In addition to his main career, he used to own a landscaping business.) The thing is, the lots in my neighbourhood aren’t huge so once Ron starts going, he often does yard work for 4 or 5 houses on the street (he has to do his M-I-L anyway.) He blew the leaves off my front lawn on Monday while I was sitting on the couch watching tv. During the winter, it is common for him to have cleared the snow off of my laneway before I get home from work. He is the best neighbour ever…but not my favourite neighbour.
My favourite is the 27 year old single mom that lives beside Ron. Tall, thin, blonde, very pretty, financially stable, friendly and nice. She is a collosal improvement over the witch that used to live there. The witch would call by-law about everything and she used scissors through the fence into Ron’s back yard to cut up the kids hockey net and other toys.